Odey gambles £10m on Trinity Mirror share fall

ONE of London’s richest hedge fund tycoons has placed a multimillion-pound bet
that shares in Trinity Mirror, the newspaper publisher, will tumble.

Crispin Odey, who made a fortune betting on collapsing bank shares during the
financial crisis, has taken a £10m wager against the owner of the Mirror
titles and a welter of regional papers including the Liverpool Echo and
Manchester Evening News.

Since November, Odey Asset Management has quietly been staging “short-selling”
raids on Trinity Mirror. Odey has borrowed 3.3% of the company’s outstanding
shares and sold them on the stock market. He will turn a profit if he can
buy them back more cheaply in the future.

Unlike his profitable short-selling attack on British banks, his Trinity
Mirror blitz has so far proved unsuccessful.

Over the past three months, the company’s market value has doubled to £312m on
hopes that Simon Fox, its new chief executive, can revive